Writing What I Believe

From "The Back Room" to "The Back Half," Life Comes Full Circle

“Write what you know” is the most common and most misguided advice every writer receives. Taken literally, which it too often is, WWYK unleashes waves of first-person experiential naval gazing upon the world.

For anyone even remotely familiar with my writing history, it may come across as a bit rich for me to be criticizing WWYK. After all, I launched my professional writing career with a first-person column, “The Back Room,” that started off chronicling the humorous aspects of being a very sexually active young gay man in D.C. (And, as I like to remind anyone within earshot, I was doing this long before Candace Bushnell birthed Sex and the City, which itself launched approximately 100,000 failed weekly column pitches over the course a decade.)

The problem with WWYK is that it stifles imagination. I’m not the first to make this point. Writers far better and more successful than I have noted that WWYK precludes, say, writing about a zombie apocalypse or warping to Alpha Centauri or scori…